Video: “Remarks on the Writing of Biography.” John L. Heilbron

Transcript

[Introductory remarks by Mary Jo Nye]

John L. Heilbron: I am grateful to the organizers for inviting me to say a few words about the writing
of biographies of contemporary scientists. I have arranged my comments under two heads
inspired by my reading of the papers you have just heard. The categories are "Trust"
and "Continence." In both cases, perhaps, biographers of scientists may have something
to tell historians of science.

Trust

As Steven Shapin has reminded us recently in his Social History of Truth, the doing of science requires reposing trust in the statements and results of one's
fellow scientist. He had in mind the seventeenth century, when scientists were gentlemen
and when it was dangerous as well as impertinent to challenge a gentleman's word.
Consequently, he says, they developed a protocol for rational debate to be able to
disagree with one another without risking a duel.

According to Sam Schweber, Hans Bethe has discovered independently of Shapin that
scientists must make a moral as well as an intellectual commitment at the outset of
their professional work; a commitment to behave so as to deserve the trust extended
to them by their colleagues. The moral aspect of science became clear to Bethe during
the 1930s, when he was a junior professor at Cornell. He remembered the time as a
Golden Age of cooperative truth-seeking in nuclear physics.

Biographers too may find it useful to trust their informants, dead or alive. Our three
biographers have given the matter sustained attention. Schweber expects the same commitment
to truth from Bethe the biographee as from Bethe the physicist. Larry Holmes' historical
method depends upon establishing what he labels an explicit and mutual trust between
himself and his informants; he assumes that they will not use him to bend the record
in their direction and they assume that he will give their current recollections the
same serious consideration he devotes to their old letters. And Judy Goodstein implicitly
trusts the intent, if not always the accuracy, of older members of the Caltech faculty,
on whose retrospective testimony she has relied in choosing and developing the themes
in her insider's history of Caltech.

There may be some cynics who think that, although mutual trust may be necessary, and
even deserved, among scholars of the same species -- like Bethe's physicists -- it
is neither viable nor desirable interspecifically. Such cynics, if any there be, might
point to Schweber's quoting without criticizing Bethe's recollections of the Golden
Age of nuclear physics as an exemplar of cooptation. After all, this putative gold
was tarnished by the destruction of the German universities, by desperate jockeying
for jobs in physics, by the apparent failure of quantum theory in the nucleus, and
by the unreliability of Gamow's calculations. The false or partial consciousness that
allowed Bethe to construct and reconstruct a scientific Golden Age out of one of the
saddest periods in European intellectual history may be an important indicator of
his character.

To continue even-handedly, the cynics might point out that Goodstein's reliance on
her colleagues has made her insider's story into a company history. As for Holmes,
the same critics might say that his eagerness to ferret out what he calls "precious
nuggets of information lurking nowhere else but in the recesses of scientists' memory"
necessarily makes him complicit in their stories. It is easy to see that his trusting
nature causes him to pull his punches. To adjust to Krebs, he forgoes a plausible
working hypothesis; to save Meselson's mystical experience, he may be assisting in
planting a story with as much verisimilitude as Robert Oppenheimer's reciting of the
Baghavadgita at the Trinity test.

A Little History

At this point you are privileged to see history in the making. As Holmes mentioned,
he asked Matt Meselson to confirm or reject his most recent explanation of certain
contradictions between Meselson's recollections of the first of the Meselson-Stahl
experiments and the documentary evidence. Unfortunately, Meselson had to leave our
meeting before he could deliver his answer. On the verge of departure this morning,
he gave me a sealed envelope. Not knowing whether he would have the time to complete
his assignment, and not wanting to disappoint Holmes, I too wrote a letter. I will
read both of them to you.

Here is the first:

"Holmes' reconstruction of the experiment C50 is that samples taken during the first
generation after transfer of a bacterial culture from heavy-to-light medium [were
confused with other samples. I'm not altogether sure that these last few words were
what the author intended. He left out his verb one of those vexations we biographers
must put up with. However, his conclusion is clear enough:] This [interpretation]
cannot be correct."

Then follows a detailed technical analysis and a recommendation: "Holmes should go
back to the archives, reread all the laboratory notebooks, review and reanalyze all
the films, in order to find out why I saw three lines rather than two."

Here is the second letter:

"Holmes' reconstruction is [the word is illegible; I think it is] ingenious. It has
brought back memories of events I had forgotten and maybe never experienced. I do
not know how I could have mixed up the samples, but I am not so arrogant as to think
that I cannot make mistakes. Still, there are a few points difficult to square with
Holmes' reconstruction. To clear them up, he should return to the archives, reread
all the laboratory notebooks, and review and reanalyze all the films."

I regret that I have mixed up the samples and cannot tell you which of these letters
is Meselson's. But you can see that, whichever it is, it is only partly his work,
for it was Holmes the historian who gave him the problem, proposed the solution, and
caused him to enrich the historical record with one of the documents I have read.
While you ponder which it is, you might ask yourself two deeper questions:

1. This document was written long after the events it concerns; at the end of a long
day filled with discordant memories; and before an early plane trip -- that is, without
immediate recourse to the pertinent records and in response to the importunities of
a historian. The document thus has doubtful authority. Do we not owe it to history
to destroy it before Holmes sees it?

2. Does it matter very much what error Meselson made? Is it not enough to understand
the successful second and third runs? Couldn't Sherlock Holmes find a more worthy
subject of investigation?

A Little Trust

I wish to separate myself from the naysayers I quoted earlier. They have missed two
important points. For one, interspecific trust -- trust between historians and scientists
-- may be as necessary as it is easy in cases like those before us, when both parties
are out to celebrate. Goodstein's book is explicitly celebratory -- it was written
for a centennial; Schweber's and Holmes' biographies are no less upbeat, since they
have as their purpose the elucidation of something that passes for an unmixed good
in our society, that is, intellectual creativity. The second point against the cynics
is that their spoiling has gone far enough. Nowadays academics and their natural enemies,
the journalists, seem to agree that the only reason for writing about established
figures and institutions is to belittle, carp, and whine.

Biographers of scientists, however, who voluntarily share the trust their subjects
accord one another, do not deconstruct heroes or bad-mouth science. We need the sort
of spiriting up that some interspecific trust might bring. That is demonstrated sufficiently
by the controversy surrounding the Smithsonian Institution's new permanent exhibition
entitled "Science in American Life."

Its opening scene, set in a replica of the original chemical laboratory at Johns Hopkins,
is an argument between two dummies representing the professor of chemistry and a German
graduate student. The student had made a marketable discovery in the laboratory, and
had marketed it; the professor complained that the student had not credited the laboratory
properly. Toward the end of the exhibit, the visitor hears sermons by Rachael Carson
and sees reminders of the damage done by pesticides and herbicides. In between, an
extensive presentation of the Manhattan Project, statistics about loss of life at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a bomb shelter resurrected from the soil of the Middle
West continue the theme that science can be inimical to your health.

The American Chemical Society, which sponsored the exhibition, was not happy with
it, but, since it had agreed that the Smithsonian would have the last word, did not
make its complaints public. Its scruples did not affect the American Physical Society,
which protested that the exhibit presented science in too dark a light. A meeting
was arranged among the Physical Society's top officers, the Smithsonian's curators,
and three independent sages. The meeting was instructive. The scientists did not regard
the curators as fellow workers in the vineyard of truth; the curators assumed that
the scientists had come to adulterate the harvest of five years of labor in the archives
and the scrap heap. Although the meeting ended amicably, neither side succeeded in
explaining its point of view to the other.

Why is there this antipathy between historians and the scientists whose work they
portray? What might be done about it?

We might conjecture that, on the one side, there is a true antipathy to science rooted
in modern social history and the anti-science movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and,
on the other side, a true contempt of the historical enterprise and a worry that public
denigration of science will further erode the funding of science.

The biographer of living scientists knows how to effect a rapprochement. Historians
who deal directly with living scientists find it desirable to qualify their criticism
before airing it. In return, scientists may be able to contain their irritation long
enough to hear nuanced criticism of their tacit beliefs and unconscious practices.
That might make them slower to declare the reconstructions of the historians vacuous
or menacing. Each side needs only to trust that the other sometimes strives for Wissenschaft.

Continence

Biographers may be particularly prone to what Saint Paul called nimis cupiditas cognoscendi -- that is, too great a desire to know. We may catch a hint of this urge in Holmes'
lament that sometimes the historian must accept "historical indeterminism." His goal,
as he expresses it, is "to retrace the thoughts and actions of the individual scientist,"
to describe every twist and turn on the pathway of discovery. When the biographee
lives for ninety years, has a large family, preserves papers and memorabilia that
fill a railroad car, and inspires a cornucopia of praise, criticism, and anecdote,
the biographer can easily lose all sense of proportion.

The authors of the papers at this session have kept their balance amid temptation,
perhaps because they are historians as well as -- or perhaps more than -- biographers.
Take Schweber's case. He has felt the impulse toward completion, he tells us, but
drew back when he discovered last fall that he already had enough for a three-volume
life of Bethe, for which, he supposes, the world is not yet ready. Consequently, he
will produce but one slim volume of five hundred pages, plus a supplementary volume
of Bethe's technical work with appropriate technical annotations.

One can only applaud this continence amid today's information glut. You send a student
to the library with a research topic; he or she returns with a list of ten thousand
books, which is enough, even if they are only five hundred pages long. How does the
historian know when to quit? Goodstein has a way that has the merit of making possible
a quiet life: she stopped her history in 1969, she explains, because that was when
her friends and contemporaries began to appear as actors in the story.

Another possible shut-off mechanism is an axe. I mean the axe one has to grind. It
is not necessary to devote a full-scale biography to every interesting person who
has left the necessary documentation. A biographer who has something to say may usefully
delimit the subject accordingly. Holmes takes the creativity of a single individual
over an extended period as his line, and seldom strays from it. He knows what he wants
to say. He is thus able to compress his accounts into five hundred pages.

Schweber is interested in intellectual style. He has devised a way of exploring it
that will probably enable him to say what he wishes to about Bethe in the restricted
compass he now designs. He plans to adopt the scheme of comparative lives of Plutarch,
with this important difference: Bethe will appear in every pair of lives examined.

The great philosopher Jerry Brown, a former governor of California, taught that less
was more. That might not be true for university budgets, but it is often true of information.
Much of what we write is unreadable, per se; but there is also much that is or could be readable to a wider audience if it were
shorter, punchier, and to a clearer purpose. Once again, the biographer may be the
bellwether. The biographer does not have to waste time, as the historian of some remote
technical topic might have to do, in justifying and explaining his or her enterprise:
the life of an interesting human being is in principle interesting to human beings,
especially if the particulars that distinguished the biographee are not submerged
in a sea of otherwise indifferent information.

It is reliably estimated that, in the year 2000, the world's publishers will issue
one million new titles. Biographers of modern scientists will not contribute much
to this glut. The Isis critical bibliographies now run to four thousand items annually; of these around
fifty are book-length biographies of modern scientists. When Judy, Larry, and I began
as historians thirty years ago, the corresponding numbers were two thousand items
and ten biographies. If we normalize for increase in the size of the profession and
for the lengthening of the twentieth century, then there has been no change at all
in the relative incidence of biography writing in the historiography of modern science.

When you consider further that biographers tend not to clutter journals, since good
biography does not lend itself to prepublication in fragments, and that few biographers
write many biographies during their careers, you conclude that the practice of biography
is as friendly to the environment as it is instructive to the mind and refreshing
to the spirit.